Forgetting Lasts So Long
by Aerecura
Summary: As an impulsive sixteen-year-old, Ariel never thought about much more than what was right under her nose. But a tragedy on her homeworld leaves her reeling and sends her life in directions she never imagined possible. The backstory of Ariel Elizabeth Shepard, from Mindoir to her N7 training and beyond. Rated T for violence and profanity.
1. Genesis

A/N: So, like it says on my profile, when I finished ME3 a few weeks ago, I was bamboozled by the ending. I felt...cheated, actually. "I've spent almost a hundred hours with this woman, and this is how her story's finished?" I thought. So this is my effort to come to terms with that ending and finally put down my FemShep's story. Starting with the events on Mindoir, it will go through the intermediate years between that/the military, her N7 training, and more. Profuse thanks to my beta, Skeasel, without whom this story would not be nearly as easy to read.

Title comes from a Pablo Neruda poem entitled "Poema veinte."

* * *

The double suns of Mindoir are setting in a scarlet blaze that lights up the horizon like a firefight as Ariel Shepard spurs her motorbike through the thigh-high grasses outside New Isfahan, her breath coming ragged to her lips. The summer wind tugs at her hair, tangling its long brown strands into knots she will spend hours combing out later. Her father's Predator pistol slams into her thigh with every side-to-side undulation of the bike, and she flattens herself against the hard seat, molding her body to the machine and exhilarating in the sensation of speed .

Her omni-tool pings. "Ari? It's almost eight. Where are you?" It's her mother's softly-accented voice, made staticky by the control towers on the outskirts of the settlement.

The wind snatches at her face, stealing the moisture from her eyes. She ignores the omni-tool, channeling her being into the impulse of forward motion. Her thighs burn as they clutch the bike's sides.

"Ari? Ari, are you there? Don't tell me you've got the Llamrei out in the hills again, you _know_ how dangerous it is to do that without telling anyone..."

New Isfahan comes closer with every second. As she hits the clearing a few miles from the settlement gates, Aodh, Mindoir's larger sun, comes out from behind a bank of clouds. The fields of Earth-bred wheat and corn, shipped from a home planet she has never seen, glow as if shaped from molten gold. Ari can feel the heat on the sharp planes of her cheekbones, on the thrumming metal of the bike. She whoops with adrenaline. The scream is lost to the Llamrei's mechanical whine.

"Ariel Elizabeth Shepard, you bring back your brother's motorbike this goddamn _instant_, or I swear to you I will go through your diary vidlogs and send them to every classmate in your _school_ -"

Ariel thumbs the omni-tool off, grinning.

The speedometer on the Llamrei needles its way up to 70 kph.

* * *

"That," mutters her brother Gareth as Ariel slings her rucksack onto the front stoop, "was a very ballsy move, El." He lounges against the doorframe, hands deep in the pockets of his coveralls, cocking an eyebrow at her. Although he does not smile, his green eyes glitter.

"You left your motorbike unprotected by the front door, what did you expect?" She dusts wheat chaff from the fields off her legs. "Wouldn't have wanted Piotr and Ilya from next door to swipe it when you weren't looking, would you? I was doing you a favor, really."

"Favor. Right." He snorts. "A week left before I leave for Alliance training, and my own damn sister can't even wait 'til I'm gone to start getting her hands on my shit." Gareth pulls a rag out of his coveralls and starts polishing the windscreen of the Llamrei. "You better have treated my baby like the jewel she is, El, or a certain someone's getting a chunk taken out of her university fund -"

Her mother's face suddenly looms through the door. _"Kir-gazel!_ Ariel, you get in here before I drag you in by your ears, you -" She lapses into Farsi. The words sound like water over river rocks to Ari's untrained ears, and she can only make out every fifth or sixth one.

"Jesus, Mom. Calm down a bit, okay?" She reaches for her, enveloping her mother's tawny-skinned hand with her own. "It was a nice day, so I thought maybe I'd take the Llamrei out for a little test drive, see how she was running since Gareth's been neglecting her so bad-"

"You could have been killed! Imagine there was a batarian raid!"

"Mom." She smooths her fingers over her mother's head scarf. "There wasn't, okay?"

"Relax, Leilah." Her father comes into the kitchen, multiple datapads in hand, shoving square-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. His green eyes, the same color as Gareth's and Ariel's, are tired but cheerful. "Ariel can handle that Llamrei better than you or I ever could. Not as well as Gareth, but -" He grins. "We can't all have engine oil running through our veins, can we? Although, young lady, your aim with that Predator leaves...something to be desired."

Leilah rolls her eyes. "Don't sweet-talk me, Caleb, that's no excuse. Ariel, consider yourself grounded."

"But I was only going out there to practice my dancing -"

"And you can't do that here?"

Ari waves her hands at the sterility of the prefab house. "What can I say? All the open space out there...the fields, the birds, the quiet..."

Leilah Shepard rolls her eyes. "We move across the galaxy to give our children a fresh start away from Earth and the gods think it's funny to give me a beatnik for a daughter?"

"You _are_ about two hundred years late to jump on that particular bandwagon," her father observes.

"Don't go all history-teacher on me, Dad. I can still feel the sun on my skin. Let me enjoy it before I get locked away in here."

Her mother glances at her father and her face softens. "Okay. Enough with the lectures." She brushes a finger over her cheeks. "I got another threat from my dear _pedar_ today. He found out I named Nadira after Mother. I forgot what a foul mouth he's got. Called her all kinds of names – well." An Iranian by birth and the only child of devout Muslim parents, Ariel's mother grew up in a house as oppressive as a tomb and just as silent. When she ran off with Ariel's father, an American atheist and a visiting anthropology professor at the Shahid Behesti University in Tehran, her father struck her face from portraits and shredded anything bearing Leilah's name: her birth announcement, high school diploma, religious studies thesis. She is a strong woman, Ari knows, but tearing up her roots to find peace with her father halfway across interstellar space has roughened her a bit. She misses the desert sands of her native country. Leilah has not spoken with her _pedar_ in nineteen years, and Ari hardly ever hears him mentioned.

Nadira's face, a smooth bronze coin framed by her father's startling blond curls, appears in the door. "What names?"

Leilah takes the child in her lap. "Nothing you need to worry about, sweetling."

Gareth ruffles his youngest sister's curls. "Hey, kid. Gonna miss your big brother when he leaves for Arcturus Station in a bit?"

Nadira regards him solemnly. "Do I get your old pistol, then?"

He snickers. "Seven years old and she's already thirsting for blood. Gotta keep your eyes on this one for me, El." Gareth beckons her with a crook of his finger. "Come with me. Keep me company while I'm packing, would you?"

"Got charts to finish for astrography class, Gareth. Can it wait?"

His lips thin and he lowers his voice. "Look, you owe me one for jacking the Llamrei today. Come on. I need to talk to you." Gareth touches her shoulder. "And I need your feminine energy to help me fit all my clothes into my goddamn bag. Or something like that."

She sniffs. "Well, if you think my presence might magically fold them for you...maybe if you didn't try to stuff so many model ships into it, you'd be able to pack more than a few socks and some boxers in that thing."

"Don't be like that, El, I need my pocket Athabasca freighter to survive at Arcturus. It's a good-luck charm, you know?"

She follows him into his bedroom. Holos of scantily-clad human and Asari pop stars decorate his walls, and stacks of papers covered with ship designs and weapons mods cover his desk. Gareth has always been skilled with gears and pistons and schematics in a way she can never understand. "You're really going, then?"

"I'm eighteen now. I always said I would go as soon as I could get off this rock."

Ariel glances out the window, at the soothing orange cropland beyond the city walls shadowed by violet mountain ranges. "You actually think of it like that?"

"No, no. I'm exaggerating. It's just – I want a little more from life than a backwater outpost on a colony world, you know?" He shoves another ream of paper into his bag. "You understand it. I can feel it in you sometimes. You're destined for more than farming, El, or becoming Dad's research assistant at the anthropology facility in New Jakarta. The way you dance – you're going to _be_ someone."

Ariel watches him, tracing out the dance steps in her mind, reliving the fluidity of her body as it ripples from first position into second, from pliés to arabesques, from traditional asari dance to human jazz and ballet. In her spare time, she sometimes dreams of what it would be like to dance for a living, bending and twisting her supple body for a Citadel dance company.

"But in the meantime..." Gareth pauses. "In the meantime I need you to be safe. And hold down the fort here. Mindoir isn't always secure, no matter what they say about the colony worlds on the extranet."

"Gareth, I know what I'm doing, okay? Why all the doom and gloom all of a sudden?"

He sighs. "I don't know. Just a feeling. I want my family to stay safe while I'm gone. Dad's a brilliant guy, but he's got the muscular development of a sea slug. And Mom – well, she doesn't like shooting if she can help it. Then there's Nadira, who, let's be honest, probably thinks she could take down a krogan task force all by her lonesome. But she can't, El. So, no pressure or anything, but -"

"I get it, Gareth. Really." She palms a model turian cruiser from her pocket and tucks it into the front flap of his Alliance-issue bag. "For good luck, yeah?"

Gareth smooths a lock of errant hair behind her ear. "Yeah. For good luck."

* * *

A/N: Please review if you have anything at all to say - you have no idea how helpful reviews are to keeping me on track! Also, bonus points to anyone who got the Llamrei reference. (Without googling it :P)


	2. Crucible

Three days later, as the twin suns beat down on Mindoir and the colony sleeps away the afternoon heat, Ari takes the Llamrei back out to the fields to dance. She stays there until after the suns have set and her body is covered with sweat, her muscles screaming. Then she settles herself into the fertile ground to sleep, just for a moment.

When Ariel sleeps in the fields she dreams of silky ears of summer corn and the song of the glassy-eyed moon, of Alliance recruits who left New Isfahan with soft hearts and submachine guns strapped to their thighs, of the lemony scent in her mother's classroom and the musky smell of her father's aftershave. Green eyes roll under closed lids. Her breath slows to the rhythm of cricket song.

When Ariel dreams, she dreams deeply, and wakes with images stuck to the wrong side of her eyelids.

Hours later, she does not hear the first explosion.

It is only when a stray beam from a pulse rifle rakes through the fields, setting them on fire, that she feels the heat on her skin. Rising groggily, she blinks and looks around her – there is the solar-powered lantern, there is the Llamrei, there is her dance mat beneath her. There is light in the sky, flashing in patterns she does not recognize. There is the settlement on fire.

Ari is up and awake before she realizes it, molding her body on the seat of the Llamrei. She leaves the mat and the lantern behind. A tap of a finger on the speeder bike's control panel and it thrums to life.

She has never driven so fast in her life. Her skin burns with the force of the wind, and as she barrels forward the tang of burning metal invades her nostrils.

_In the meantime I need you to be safe._

Gareth's words come back to her.

_Hold down the fort._

When she reaches the outpost's walls, she kills the Llamrei's engine and ducks behind a tree. Batarians have overrun the city's north gate, and they are shooting anyone they find. Piles of bodies are heaped by front doors where children once jumped rope and ate Mindoirian peaches in the sun.

A boy breaks from cover and makes a run for the safety of the clearing outside the wall, zigzagging through the raiders. He is not fast enough. The crack of a weapon sounds and he is mowed down, small body splayed on the ground. Blood soaks his shirt as his screams fade away to rasps at the back of his throat. He raises his head one last time, his eyes catching the moonlight, and Ari recognizes him as her next-door neighbor Ilya.

She wants to scream. Ari balls her hands into fists and barricades her mouth with them, willing the sound to stay inside her. She cannot allow herself to crack. Not when everything depends on the slightest detail: the spasm of a finger on a trigger, the interplay of shadows over her face that keep her hidden.

She's seen plenty of murders on the extranet, watching campy vids with her family on school holidays. She's seen a speeder accident forty meters away from her housing unit, when the rider's legs ended up on a different side of the street than his arms and head. But nothing could ever have prepared her for this. As sweat forms an oily sheen on her body, she begins to tremble so hard that her teeth clamp down hard on her lip. Blood leaks into her mouth, and the iron taste of it makes her head reel.

"Pssst. El. _Pssst._" A hand clenches her shoulder, and she nearly yelps in fright, twisting her body around.

"Gareth?"

"It really is you? Jesus, Ariel, I thought we'd lost you." Gareth's words come hot and fast from lips pinched with fear. "Are you insane, coming back here like this? You could've made it away!"

"The hell I would've, Gareth." She seizes his fingers in her own. Both their hands are trembling. "Tell me – tell me what happened." Ariel isn't sure she wants to know.

"It...it was just like one of those pulp horror vids. We were all sleeping when the first bomb hit. Quarter of the settlement gone, just like that." He shakes his head. "Mom and Dad got us up and running to the raid shelter two blocks away. Shit, didn't ever think we'd have to use that thing. But by that time the batarians had already landed their ground troops. They -" He is crying, though he tries not to show it. He wipes the tears away with the back of his hand, leaving smears of blood on his cheek.

Ariel feels the pit of her stomach drop away. "Where are they, Gareth?"

"They got Dad before we had even turned the corner, and -"

The grasses scratch at her face, and she tears angrily at them. "_No._"

"- Mom when we made it to the shelter. They'd already blown the doors off the hinges, so we had to turn around -"

"Gareth, this isn't funny, tell me you're lying -"

"- and I didn't know what to do! They were dead there in the streets, El, both of them, their faces blown off, they looked like -"

"-but where is Nadira?" She seizes him by the shoulders. "Gareth, _where is Nadira_?"

A sob catches in his throat. "I don't know, God, I don't know, we were separated..."

A part of Ariel wants to wrap the shuddering grasses around her body and lie there until the batarians put a bullet through her so that she never wakes up again. But that isn't the part of her that wins out.

Gareth is still speaking. "I thought, if I could only make it to the defense turrets on top of the wall...the raiders hacked into them, but El, if I can get there we have a fighting chance. They slagged a couple of the turrets right off the bat with the bombs, but there are a few I could still fiddle with -"

She squares her shoulders. "What do I need to do?"

"Punch through this knot of batarians by the gate. Once they're gone, I might be able to make it to the elevator shafts." His eyes plead through a scrim of tears. "Ariel, I know this is dangerous -"

In her mind are images of her mother in the easy chair of the family room. Her feet are kicked up and her headscarf is pushed back to let tendrils of dark hair escape, a faint smile tugging at her lips. There is another image of her father with a hand on her shoulder, the clean baritone of his voice soothing her as he explains Late Twentieth Century Earth History.

"I -" For a moment, tears choke her again, and she is unable to speak. "I don't know if I can. But I'll try. Go, Gareth."

He hesitates.

"_Run_, you idiot!"

His palm grasps hers, depositing an angular object in her hand. She unfolds her fingers. The smooth metal of the model turian cruiser winks at her. "For good luck, El."

She shakes her head furiously. "I'll see you on the other side, Gareth." Ariel pulls the Predator from its holster, slipping the model cruiser in its place, and aims the gun at the closest batarian. Maybe it's a good luck charm, after all. Her hands are steadier. Although her aim is only average, the short distance means that hitting her target shouldn't be impossible.

A roar sounds from the mouth of the gun. It recoils against her sweaty palm. The alien drops to the ground.

Behind her, Gareth disappears without a sound into the grasses.

* * *

She doesn't know how long she's there, firing bullet after bullet. Although half her shots are misses, the others find their marks. The batarian forces are reduced from thirteen to seven, but they are drawing closer, slowly picking out the source of the carnage from the shifting greenery.

But with each shot, her mind grows more serene. It's almost like dancing: the execution of that grand jeté giving her confidence to tackle the next step, growing more expressive with each movement. Every shot is more precise than the one before. Ari has never used a weapon in a real combat situation, but as she grimly gathers her wits, she finds that her mind falls into a kind of trance. Although her hand begins to burn with the repeated motion of pulling the trigger that is too big for her adolescent fingers, she pushes the pain to the back of her mind.

And then a light-footed shadow creeps around the gate's edges. It breaks her concentration, and she glances at it. A shard of moonlight glints off coppery hair and a round, determined face.

_Nadira._

She is torn. Breaking cover means her own death. Remaining in the grass may condemn her sister. For a minute she agonizes, knowing that each second without action means that the raiders are getting closer to her.

One of them notices the blonde girl in the shadows. He hefts his gun with a snarl.

Ariel leaps from cover, finally allowing her pent-up scream to escape. Her hands squeeze the pistol, which fires several wide shots. But it draws their attention. They aim their weapons at her, closing in fast on her position.

Nadira stays frozen, eyes wide.

"Nadira! Run!" she yells over the tumult. "I'll be right behind you!"

A fiery bloom of pain tints her vision black at the edges. One of the batarians has hit her in the shoulder. Her left arm droops, useless.

Her sister runs. Not quickly enough.

A bullet takes her in the back of the head. Nadira falls forward, surprise written over her smooth face, as blood and brain matter course down her neck. Bits of cloud-white skull and blonde curls rain to the ground.

"You fucking _assholes_!" she screeches, despair taking over. The Predator is overheated – she can feel the blisters forming on her hands – but she pushes it in front of herself like a shield and surges forward. The first batarian she hits grunts and doubles over, cursing in a strange, hissing language. With her good arm she slams the pistol into his face.

Arms seize her shoulders and heave her backwards. She goes down hard on her leg, which twists under her, and sprawls unprotected on the ground. One of the raiders raises his own weapon and strikes her just over her right eyebrow.

Agony worse than she has ever felt, even worse than the torturing pain in her left shoulder, takes her body by storm. Her limbs go limp, and she drops the Predator.

___I hope that was good enough, Gareth__, _she thinks hazily before she slips away.

* * *

A/N: hope you enjoyed this (well, 'enjoyed' being a relative term...). Loved it? Liked it? Repulsed by it? Drop me a review and let me know what you think :)


	3. Mourning

A/N: Bioware owns all. Except Ari, kind of. And Deveaux, who is (unfortunately) mine.

* * *

Gareth Amir Shepard dies at 16:27 and 43 seconds on a medical station in the Attican Traverse, coated in medigel and skin flayed away by the fire that has worked its way into his bones and blood and taken his life. The doctors had tried to regrow the skin that sloughed off like water in the attack, but his system couldn't take the onslaught of antiobiotics and regrowth serums and skin grafts and surgeries. He lies there like a body ripped inside out, like nothing but the outline of a human form painted in black and red. At first the charred and rotting smell of him made Ari vomit until there was nothing left in her stomach, but for days now she has simply sat, inured to it.

She is there to watch him take his last breath. She's known for several days that the end has been coming. Although the doctors with their plastic faces and harsh white scrubs haven't told her, she can read the downward slant of their eyes and the firming of their lips when they check Gareth's vitals. He has survived for a week after she woke up, covered in bandages, comatose, but alive. Ari got away with lacerated skin on her face and shoulders, a fractured skull, shrapnel in her left arm, and a broken left femur after the batarians left her for dead. Gareth wasn't so lucky. His run to the defense turret was successful, they told her later, clearing a path to allow Alliance reinforcements into New Isfahan, but they arrived at a settlement that was already in flames. Raiders barricaded the walls, and Gareth was left to burn alive in the turret control room.

Sometimes at night, she imagines his helplessness: the fire creeping closer and the smoke slashing at his lungs, while the batarians fire relentlessly into the door he locked behind him.

She doesn't cry or hide her face as the nurses come into the room, reading his vital charts and peeling needles out of his body. They are businesslike in their routine. Ari knows why; although she has not seen them, there are other survivors from the colony, and none of them made it out unscathed. To them, Gareth is The Patient in Bed 57, Third-Degree Burns, Critical Condition. In other rooms, maybe, are friends and neighbors she knows. But Ariel has no desire to seek them out.

Absentmindedly she reaches for a strand of dark hair to twirl around her index finger. Her hand brushes over a thick layer of bandages. _Stupid_, she chides herself, interlacing her fingers in her lap. They shaved off all her hair when they brought her aboard the med ship. At times she wonders where they put it, if perhaps somewhere they have a bag filled with her long, thick hair.

Ariel doesn't speak when they pull the sheet up over his face. She hasn't spoken since she woke up. It's not that she doesn't want to. The words get trapped in her throat, never reaching her mouth. The tears, too. She finds herself screaming and sobbing in dreams and wakes to discover her mouth open in a silent _O_, her cheeks dry.

"Time of death 16:27," says one of the nurses, whipping out her omni-tool and making a note. "Cause of death: stage four hypovolaemic shock due to burns of the epidermal tissue, dermis, and muscular structure. Extensive fluid loss..." She jots down jargon for a moment longer, then grasps Ari's wheelchair with a practiced hand. "Sweetheart, let's get you back to your room, all right?"

Ari allows herself to be wheeled out of the room and back to her own down the hall. She dips her hand into the pocket of her hospital-issue coveralls, pinching her thighs just to generate feeling. Pinching. Pinching. As the nurse busies herself, taking a sample of blood from Ariel's arm, she stares blankly at the wall and smooths her fingers along the pocket's edges, where the model turian cruiser used to be.

"What's in your pocket that's got you so interested, Ms. Shepard?" The voice coming from just outside her room is unfamiliar, deep and cutting. Ari twists around, ignoring the screaming pain in her deltoids to catch a glimpse of him. He wears an Alliance military uniform and no expression on his face.

"Leave us, Nurse Ellis," he commands.

The nurse glances at Ari, then back to the man. "But sir, her brother just -"

"I said _leave _us. What part of that brooks an argument?"

She nods and thumbs the control on the door as she backs away. It hisses shut behind her.

"So, Ms. Shepard. At last I am permitted to meet you. An honor." He proffers a hand, which she does not shake. "Allow me to introduce myself. I'm Captain Deveaux of the _SSV Einstein._ One of the officers sent to Mindoir when the distress call went out.

She still does not speak, just stares at him. Although he is only in his mid-forties, there are deep furrows in his forehead. His eyes are an icy blue.

"Your brother was a hero, Ms. Shepard. Most of the men and women we managed to save from New Isfahan are alive thanks to his efforts." He pauses, waiting again for a reply. "And to yours."

Nothing.

Suddenly Captain Deveaux drops the decorous demeanor of an Alliance officer. "So we're going to take that tack with it, are we? Going to give the silent treatment like a teenage brat whose mommy won't let her go to that party with her tits practically hanging out, hmm?"

Ariel stares at him, wide-eyed. He chuckles, eyes cold. "Got your attention, didn't I? The fact of the matter is, Ms. Shepard, that although I'm sorry for your loss, I'm not here to coddle you by mourning for people I never knew. We lost a hell of a lot of good people on that planet." He jerks his head down the hall, toward Gareth's room. "But you know that."

Captain Deveaux, Ari thinks, reminds her of one of the lions native to Earth that she saw in vids back in school. Proud. Capable. And very, very dangerous.

"My crew was the one who rescued you, you know." He paces in a circle around her wheelchair, the click of his boots echoing off the walls like gunshots. "We located you in the grass when you were picking off those batarians one by one. Couldn't get you, of course, since the batarians had shields up around the whole damn operation. You've got balls, Ms. Shepard. But your aim needs work. And that foolhardy little maneuver afterwards? Running out into the open with your weapons blazing?" His lips thin in a pinched smile. "Looks good, sure. But it's like strolling into combat with your fly down. Careless, dear heart. Had you stayed where you were..." Captain Deveaux shrugs. "Who knows, after all? Perhaps your sister would still be with us today."

For the first time in a week, Ariel feels raw emotion clawing at her like a rancorous beast, creating two red spots of anger on her cheeks. She locks eyes with the man across the room, and he cocks an eyebrow.

"You wonder why I'm telling you all this? You wonder why I'm admonishing you the moment after your brother died? You wonder why I care about a green sixteen-year-old kid fresh off a backwater planet in the Traverse?"

At first she does nothing. Then, after a tense pause, she nods.

"Ahh. Communication, though of the non-verbal sort. We're getting somewhere, Ms. Shepard. Well." He spins on his heel, drumming his fingers on the side table by her bed. "The fact is that you have potential. You and your brother, Ariel Shepard, knocked my goddamn socks off back on Mindoir, Mostly your brother, you know, quite the talent with schematics. And he showed a restraint that you don't quite...possess. Shame he never made it to Arcturus Station. He would have become a talented soldier one day." He steeples his hands. "But you're different. You're still here. And you could be a valuable asset to the Systems Alliance one day, if you so choose. So all I want to do -" Deveaux leans forward, as if about to divulge a secret - "is point you in the right direction. So to speak. In a year and nine months, you'll be eighteen. Old enough to enlist. And if that's the route you pick...know that there will be a bunk waiting for you on Arcturus Station."

Anger still thrums in her veins. She thinks of Gareth's body being wheeled to the morgue, where it will join all the other who were strong enough to make it off Mindoir but not strong enough to survive the aftereffects.

She will never be able to replace her brother. Captain Deveaux's words sting just as strong as the _tlaxta_ bees in the fields of New Isfahan. Ariel stares him down, teeth gritted, and he chuckles.

"Oh, and Ms. Shepard?" He puts a hand on the arm of her wheelchair. "I recommend that you begin talking again. Your silence as a show of grief is admirable. But your brother is dead, dear heart, and he doesn't give a flying fuck whether you ever part your lips again."

Ariel brings her right arm back to slap him across the face.

Captain Deveaux seizes her hand before it ever gets there and tugs it back, causing a white-hot flash of pain to shoot down her arm. She snarls silently at him.

"Have you been listening to me at all, Ms. Shepard? Do you remember what I told you about your idiotic maneuver back on Mindoir? And do you _think _that this is any different or more admirable?" He sighs and drops her hand. "You will find that strong-arming your way through life – in the most literal sense – isn't going to get you very far. But that, of course, is where we come in." He steps away and presses the button that operates the door. Nurse Ellis is waiting exactly where Ari saw her last, as if life outside the room froze during their conversation and is just now resuming its normal rhythm. "Does she have next of kin?"

"Yes, Captain. Both paternal grandparents are living in the United States. Alice and Mark Shepard. And a maternal grandfather in Iran." She hesitates. "He's...not been responding to our messages."

"Send her to the U.S., then, as soon as she's fit for travel." He turns back to Ariel. "It's been a pleasure to speak with you, Ms. Shepard. And take this as a token of my...hmm...admiration. My crew found it on the ground next to where you fell." He slips a hand into his jacket and withdraws the model turian cruiser. Its wings are melted now, and the once-smooth metal is jagged, but the jaunty stripes of red and orange down the ship's sides are just as bright.

She takes it from him. For a moment his mouth flickers into a genuine smile. Then it disappears.

"Good day."

As the door glides closed, she catches a glimpse of him standing at attention, flicking his hand to his brow as if in salute.

* * *

A/N: Reviews make lovely food for thought, you know! Really, though, I'd love to know your opinion: the good, the bad, the ugly, etc. It's what keeps me writing.

As always, a thank you to my beta, Skeasel, and this time to jklinders of the masseffectfanfic boards, who saved me from making some very silly lore mistakes that would've had you all tittering at me.


	4. Planetside

A/N: Witty disclaimer of choice goes here! As always, thanks to my beta, Skeasel, and if you like what you're reading, drop me a review! It's always much easier to write knowing that people are actually reading this.

* * *

When Nurse Ellis has judged her shattered tibia to be mostly repaired, Ariel is released into the care of her grandparents. She's sent back to Earth on an Alliance carrier shuttling soldiers from active duty to shore leave before they're deployed again. Traveling with her are three other Mindoir survivors: a thin, hollow-eyed woman, a bow-backed old man, and a young boy with a thatch of strawberry-blonde hair and only one eye. She does not know any of them, and they do not speak to one another.

Ariel's speech returns sporadically, in short bursts of "yes" and "please" and "where's the restroom." She spends most of her time aboard the _SSV Bernini_ curled catlike by the viewport in her tiny bunk. Ariel has never traveled farther than two or three planets away from Mindoir; her parents couldn't have afforded the charge. When they dock for refueling, she presses her nose to the port and watches the infinitesimal movements of a galaxy she has only experienced through the vidscreen at school. Clouds of hydrogen and helium and space flotsam intertwine to create great violet-and-blue nebulae. The bright, twinkling colors of planets the size of gems gleam from pockets of deep space like forgotten coins in the gutter. Freighters and corvettes of all sizes fight for berths at spaceports in the Attican Beta system. The Voyager cluster. The Exodus cluster.

She feels like one of those pilgrims making the hajj that her mother told her about: traveling through the desert and over the mountains to reach this Mecca, Earth, this place of untold beauty and civilization, this place she has never seen nor been capable of envisioning. The thought awakes in her some small seed of emotion. It is much smaller than happiness or excitement. But it is there.

Ariel still feels foreign when she catches glimpses of herself in the mirror. Lingering lumps and scars stipple her face (Nurse Ellis has told her that she doesn't know whether they'll ever disappear entirely). Her scalp is bristly with the stubble of new-grown hair. She has lost weight since the attack, and her green eyes loom large out of her newly-gaunt face. She is not beautiful, and she often misses her once-smooth skin and the long dark hair she so thoughtlessly would allow the wind to tangle.

They dock at the orbital station above Earth after a week of travel. An Alliance minder arrives to ferry Ari and her few possessions to the Dulles Spaceport near America's capitol, where she will meet her grandmother and grandfather. After a few stilted questions meet with Ari's equally stilted replies, the minder gives up trying to talk with her and simply guides her in silence to the proper terminal. Ariel's legs are still weak from so many days in a wheelchair, and several times they must stop to let her rest. Her lungs burn with the breaths she heaves in, and she wonders how her body was ever sturdy enough to run or dance or heft a weapon.

The dull blue oceans and ferrocrete-and-glass-covered landmasses of Earth pass below them. To Ari's gaze, the gray landscape devoid of so much color is completely foreign. She recognizes the continents – there is Asia, there Africa, there Europe – but not the smoky clouds of smog darkening some sections of the sky, or the constant flow of air traffic, making it look like ants are crawling across the globe's surface.

Their shuttle is delayed for landing because of a mechanical malfunction, so Ari and her minder spend a stiff half-hour squirming in their seats. She tries to envision what her grandparents will be like. Will she resemble them? Do they want her, or has the Alliance foisted her off on them like an unwelcome package? Ariel wonders if this is a wise course of action, if she should have gone someplace else. But where? Where could she possibly have gone except here?

The minder cracks his knuckles, the sound magnified by the mostly-empty shuttle to sound like gunshots. Each pop makes Ari feel like she is sitting atop hot coals.

Eventually the shuttle's comm system crackles to life. "We will now be resuming landing procedure," a crisp voice says. "We apologize for the delay. Please take your seats and gather your belongings."

Ariel sits rigid, as if bolted to her chair. Outside the viewport, the dock comes into view. A mechanical arm extends and attaches itself to the shuttle. Right outside, she knows, is the passenger lounge. Where the non-flyers will be waiting to greet their family and friends.

The minder clears his throat once they've touched down. "Let's get moving," he says, not unkindly.

Her stomach clenches. She nods, stands, and follows him out.

The crowd waiting to receive the shuttle is small. The minder steers Ari towards the back of the cluster. She realizes that he must already know who they're looking for.

They come to a stop in front of a short and slender woman, her ash-blonde hair liberally streaked with gray. Her green eyes take in the stubble-haired, painfully lean girl in front of her, and she opens her mouth, then closes it again.

"Ma'am," says the minder respectfully, to fill the silence.

"You're Ariel," says her grandmother, biting her lip. "You...you're very...you look so much like _her_."

_She means my mother._ "Yes," Ariel offers quietly, crossing her arms over her chest.

She reaches out and puts her hands on Ariel's shoulders. Ari flinches. "Oh, I'm sorry," she says with a small gasp. "Of course, you wouldn't like being touched, not after..." She shakes her head. "I'm handling this all wrong. I'm Alice Shepard. Your grandmother. Call me...well, I don't know. Whatever you want."

"I'll need you to sign this, Mrs. Shepard," says the minder, punching a few buttons on his omni-tool. A holographic document appears in the air in front of him. Alice slides her finger across the indicated space at the bottom to sign her name, distracted.

"Well." She draws in a heavy breath. "That's it, then. She can come with me now?"

The minder nods. "She's yours. And thank you, Mrs. Shepard, from the Alliance. For taking her. If Ariel ever needs assistance of any kind..." He trails off. "Contact us. Your family deserves the help."

_I'm right here, _she thinks. _And still sentient, you know. _Before, she might have said as much, quirking an eyebrow and pursing her lips. Now she just crosses her arms over her chest and stares.

"We'll be going, then. Ariel...?" Her grandmother beckons her with one slim wrist. "I've got the skycar in the E-15 garages. It's a bit of a walk. Can you..."

"I can walk," she says, her voice flat.

"I..." Alice flinches. "Of course you can.

They make their way through corridors bustling with humans hawking asari-designed textiles and caramel coffees and used spacecraft. The transparent floor-to-ceiling panels along the spaceport's walls act as windows to the city outside them. Concrete and steel spires hundreds of stories rise dizzyingly tall, like so many fingers grasping at the sky. The sheer _vividness_ of it all helps Ari forget the pain in her leg.

Her grandmother has been talking. "- and I'm sorry your grandfather Mark couldn't come to get you too, but he was servicing a senator's skycar, most important commission we've had in weeks -"

She tunes it out and keeps walking.

The old but dignified car Alice stops at is an Ariake-made Tigris model, its logo embossed on the side. Ariel looks at it wonderingly as she slides open the passenger door and falls into her seat, her body shaking from the effort of walking so far in one day. No one but the most prosperous colonists on Mindoir had anything from the Ariake line, much less a Tigris. _Gareth would have shit himself to ride in one of these_.

Alice catches her staring. She opens her mouth to ask a question but closes it again, waiting to see if Ariel will speak.

She does. "This skycar. It's nice."

"It's your grandfather's. I wouldn't have bought it, we aren't _so _well-to-do, but..." The ghost of a smile appears on her lips. "'Alice, if the mechanic doesn't have a nice ride, then who the hell is going to trust him to work on anything bigger than a kid's hov-scooter, for chrissakes,' that's what he told me." She pauses. "I...hear your brother liked mechanical engineering, that sort of thing."

As the Tigris works up speed, Ari watches the buildings blur. "Yeah. He did."

"He was the one out of you three children that I ever met. He was four months old when your parents moved away. Had my eyes, Mark's hair."

Ariel watches her intently as she drives. "You mean you saw him when they still lived here? On Earth? My parents?"

"Yes. Your mother was pregnant with you when they left. They started receiving death threats from Leilah's father. It was..." She sighs. "Hardly conducive to raising children in peace."

They don't speak again until they arrive at the apartment complex. Alice and Mark live in one of the sprawling high-rises that clings to the outskirts of the city like suburbanite leeches. Although not as tall as the core of the city, they still tower high enough that when the Tigris dips into lower lanes of traffic, the sun is all but blocked out. Ariel shivers as shadows fall over them.

Her mind starts to bubble with some of her old curiosity –_ how many people live here? Did my father grow up in these buildings? Where are all the _trees_? _- but the questions only tighten her throat, preventing her from speaking.

Alice steers the skycar into a cavernous garage, guiding it towards a small bay. Pneumatic seals hiss shut on the Tigris as Ari and her grandmother unbuckle themselves and make for a nearby elevator. _I hope they live near the top_, thinks Ari. The idea of living like a caged insect, crushed under the weight of so many other floors, terrifies her. The garage even smells subterranean, like scorched earth.

Alice seems to read her mind. "It'll be a ways up to the apartment, I'm afraid. We live on the 200th floor, and the lift isn't what it used to be." A smile graces her face. "Thank God Mark's not here. He whines about it every time we step on the thing."

"It won't bother me," Ariel says quietly, and steps towards the calm, blinking glow of the elevator.

Her grandparents' apartment, though small, has that distinct lived-in feeling. She feels like she can sense the memories of all the footprints on the welcome mat, all the hours spent curled up by the news terminal, all the meals eaten at the table. A holo on the wall cycles through pictures of Alice, Mark, and their children. In one old shot of her father, he beams sunnily at the camera, old-fashioned glasses pushed up high on the bridge of his nose. A sturdy older girl who must be his sister has her arm draped around him as she grins.

"I never met her," she says, studying the cycle of family pictures. There are so many aspects of her newfound family members that she has never considered before.

"Hmm?"

"My aunt. Hannah. That – that was her name, right? _Is_ her name?"

"Hannah, yes, of course." Alice sets her bag down on a table and fusses with her hair in a mirror. "She would've been here to see you if she could have. She wants to meet you. But she's serving an active tour with the Alliance right now in the Horsehead Nebula." She turns. "I know, Ariel, this isn't what you're used to. All these walls, and cramped spaces, and...well. It's the best we could do. We wanted to move, when we heard, to give you more room to yourself. But we couldn't afford it."

"You didn't have to...for me -"

Alice pushes open a door. "We gave you Hannah's old room. It's still just the way she left it, but you can fix it up however you'd like."

Like the rest of the apartment, the room is tiny but cheery. A lofted bed with neatly made periwinkle sheets hangs over a desk installed with a computer terminal. The walls are a soothing white. Windows overlook the bustle of the city.

"Well? Do you like it, Ariel?"

For the first time that day, tears threaten to overwhelm her. "Call me Ari," she manages to say, sitting down hard on the bed.

Alice hesitates, back against the doorframe. "Ari, then. We never imagined we'd be raising another child. Much less a child who has been through what...you have." She indicates the myriad bandages that still decorate Ariel's body. "But don't think for a minute that we mind."

"I'm glad, Alice. Really."

They regard each other for a moment, each finding traces of the other in their identical green gaze. "I'll be in the kitchen, if you need me," Alice says at last. "Rest up a bit, why don't you? It's been quite a day."

She closes the door behind her, leaving a faint scent of yellow roses in the air.

Ari dips her hand into her pack, drawing out Gareth's final gift to her. She places the turian cruiser on the desk, nose pointing toward the broad expanse of the city outside the windows. Then she leans back in the padded chair, relaxing her muscles, and signs into the terminal.

"One new message," a cool, feminine voice tells her.

_From who? _she wonders, and pulls it up.

Captain Deveaux's white-haired head materializes on the screen in front of her, and she jerks back in her seat. "Ms. Shepard. I'm sorry we parted on such an unpleasant note before. I'd like to rectify that. By this point, you'll have made it to your new accommodations, I trust. You've earned a measure of peace. Don't hesitate to take it." He pauses, then goes on. "But you should be aware that there are forces on Earth who would react...strongly if your presence here becomes known. If you should need Alliance help -" he extends his hand - "don't hesitate to reach for it."

_What the hell? _she thinks, her gaze tracking his every recorded movement.

The Alliance officer inclines his head, just barely. "Deveaux out."

* * *

A/N: Okay, yeah, I know, the real Hannah Shepard was at Mindoir. That's changing, though, because here she's Shep's aunt, not her mother. (I'm altering canon. Pray I do not alter it further :P)


	5. Catharsis

A/N: Regretfully, all this does not belong to me, etc. etc. etc.

* * *

In time, Ariel learns to navigate the city's monorail system with so many brightly-colored lines like twisted threads. She goes to school, where huddles of girls her age whisper about her bald patches and her scars and then, gradually, become accustomed to it. She grows used to living like an ant in a warren, lying on her bed while her grandmother cooks and her grandfather bangs his hydrospanners around, cursing mildly. Her limp lessens and then disappears.

She doesn't dream of pistol fire and blood every night now. Only some of the time.

* * *

One afternoon, when the smog hangs heavy over the city like a greasy skin, Ari takes her lunch to a table in the corner where the rest of the socially-discarded students sit. She normally eats outside, but sometimes the air threatens to choke her, and the smell reminds her of smoke and ashes. Legs crossed on the uncomfortable standard-issue bench, she forks the occasional bite into her mouth and watches. Passively contemplating the actions of her fellow students has become her default approach to any free time she has at school. She knows what the others say about her: _she never talks to anyone _and _why doesn't she use makeup on those scars to cover them up _and _I heard she used to live out in the Traverse, in bumfuck nowhere._ Speaking to them gets her nowhere. Watching is so much easier. She feels like an entomologist peering into a hive of bees, taking notes on their swarm patterns and whimsies of flight.

"Hey! _Watch _it, would you, you're about to run into me -" One boy collides with another at the entrance to the cafeteria a few tables away. His lunch goes soaring into the air. Its trajectory, Ari realizes, means that it's headed straight for her. She closes her eyes and throws up her hands to avoid getting yogurt and fruit mush on her face.

It never hits. A few girls the next table over shriek. Ariel opens her eyes.

The lunch is suspended in a hazy cloud of blue, spinning lazily in the air. She glances down at her hands and sees that the cloud is tethered to them. Ari gasps, her mind going blank, and the food drops to the floor with a wet smack.

"You're a _biotic_?" a kid with a faceful of acne says. "I've never seen one of those before."

"No. No, I'm not." She rubs her hands together in disbelief. "Maybe someone's datapad blew. I – I didn't do that."

"You should've been some mass of cancer cells by now," a girl nearby mutters. "Lucky us, we ended up with you instead."

After the teachers clear all the students out of the cafeteria and call the authorities, they have a doctor look her over. As he jabs Ariel's arm with needles and records test results on his omni-tool, his gaze slides away from hers, like eye contact might make her throw him to the ground and attack him.

"Well, well," he says, and then, as if at a loss, "well. We'll need you to come in for further testing. You're a live one, you are. How...providential."

* * *

"It doesn't make you any different, you know," says Alice as Ari slings her bag gracelessly onto the floor. She shakes her head. "All the stories about biotics – the mind-reading, the telekinesis, the what-have-you - I don't believe them."

"I have to go first thing tomorrow morning to the hospital to get scans, that's what the doctor who came said," Ariel says, her voice flat. "After that..."

"...you come back here and keep going to school like you have been all this time. Nothing will be any different." She tucks a thatch of gray-blonde hair behind one ear and sighs.

"They had these rumors, awhile ago." Ari starts pacing the room, restless. "Rumors that kids who turned out to be biotics got taken away. No one ever knew where." She remembers a kid two planets away from Mindoir, a boy with plump cheeks and constellations of blackheads dotting his thirteen-year-old skin. When he blew up a system of semiconductors and set his neighborhood on fire, there had been a media frenzy that was quickly hushed up. She recalls, though the memory is eight years old and fuzzy, glancing at his picture on the vidscreen at home while a shrill anchorwoman warns about the potential danger of biotic flare-ups. "Their families never heard from them. No one did." _But everyone whispered about what had happened to them_, she doesn't say.

"Times have changed," Alice insists, but she bites her lip anyway. "Hannah once told me that there are even a few biotics in the Alliance, nowadays. Young ones, but...they're valued, I hear."

Ari sprawls on the couch, crossing her legs at the ankles as she stares at her hands. "And here you thought you were just getting damaged goods with no hair and a bad leg from the Traverse." She laughs without mirth. "Never mind damaged goods who can make blue stuff shoot out of their hands."

Alice gets up from where she has been ensconced at the kitchen table. "Was that the only time it's happened? Can you control it at all?"

"Yeah, there have been many times in my life when I've stopped random incoming objects with a mass effect field that I just happened to generate." She rolls her eyes. "No. It's never happened before. And..." Ari closes her eyes for a moment, concentrating until her head feels like it's filled with lead. "Nope. Can't do it again."

"You know," enthuses Alice, "Mark will be thrilled. Imagine, an assistant who can float a hydrospanner or electro-wrench to him with her mind when he's grubbing around under someone's skycar."

"If they don't cart me away first," Ari says, her face dark.

Alice places an arm around Ari's shoulder, tentative. Ariel tenses, but then gives in to the comforting sensation and sighs. Alice's slight smile is as welcome and refreshing as a shard of light breaking through a bank of clouds.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous, Ari. I may look harmless, but I'd shoot their legs out from under them before they could lift a finger at you," she says cheerfully.

* * *

Later that evening, she opens her terminal's display to research the manifestation of biotic abilities. She stumbles upon several conspiracy theories and extremist circles before groaning and giving up. Ari is about to close the terminal when it informs her that she has a new message waiting in her inbox. Her stomach plummets. _What if it's from school? What if I've been expelled or – or worse?_

The message is only text, no recording. _Good evening, Ariel, _it says. _I heard about what happened today. I'm sure you have questions, and I want you to know that there are people out there on your side. I can give you answers. Meet me at 23:00 outside the Amera. - a friend_

_ "_Is it suddenly fashionable for people to starting sending me cryptic messages?" she mutters. The Amera is an upscale restaurant the next neighborhood over from her grandparents' apartment complex. She's passed by its gilded sign and clean white facade on the monorail, but never entered it.

And 23:00 is in half an hour. Hardly enough time to throw on a pair of shoes and sneak out the door. If she chooses to go.

_Careless, dear heart. _Captain Deveaux's voice echoes in her mind. _Careless._

Leaving, after all, would be foolhardy. After Mindoir, she has told herself that she will never be lured into another trap. She won't risk the humble life she has built here for a few words of comfort she may or may not find. This, she knows, could very well be a mistake.

Yet sometimes she can't help thinking of the old Ari, the one with the supple smile and the musky scent of half-sown fields in her hair. The one who wouldn't have hesitated.

_And why shouldn't you go? _that girl whispers. _This building's choking the breath out of you anyway. _Which is true. Sometimes she still feels like she can hardly draw breath within the complex's cramped walls, and the stale, sweat-scented air makes her nauseous.

_No one has to know. And you can't be afraid forever._

The door to the apartment shudders closed behind her, as soft as a fall breeze flicking through the fields of a planet that now seems as tenuous as a dream.

* * *

The Baroukh neighborhood, where the Amera is located, has clean sidewalks and streets lined with glass-fronted businesses. Glossy vehicles hum down the avenues like a hazy _pas-de-deux _of headlights and muted beeping. A few men in hand-tailored suits and genuine leather shoes polished to a shine walk, self-assured, from building to building and disappear through heavy oak doors.

Ari glances down at her ill-fitting jeans from a shabby consignment store, at the sturdy but unattractive boots Alice bought for her. She does not fit in here. Each elegant street she crosses makes her throat a little drier.

When she finally reaches the Amera, her palms are sweaty and her lips pinched. _What if it's a trick, or a test, or no one's there_?She considers turning around and leaving. _Careless. Careless, I was careless. _But she has come this far, and she will not turn back. Already she can see the shadowy figure of a person.

A man leans against the wall outside of the restaurant, his arms at his sides, his gaze watchfully sweeping the street. He wears an impeccable gray suit and holds a black briefcase like a weapon. His eyes fix on her, then widen.

"You're Ariel," he says. It isn't a question. He proffers a swarthy hand, which she takes. His grip encloses her small hand. "You came after all. I was afraid you wouldn't."

There is something powerfully magnetic about this man, and Ari feels compelled to tell him the truth. "I almost didn't."

"Oh, Ariel, that would have been a shame. I have your best interests at heart. You know that, right?"

She looks him up and down, her gaze lingering on his neatly trimmed beard, his abundant but graying black hair, his thin neck long and unexpectedly elegant like a swan's. Why would such a man want to help her? "I don't know you," she says. "Are you...part of some kind of organization that helps biotics?"

"Ahh..." He makes a sound deep in the back of his throat, as if pained. "Doesn't know me, she says. _Me. _After I spent all this time looking for her, searching for her, trying to save her. Ariel -" he takes her other hand in his own, and she notices his fine-boned fingers, so like her mother's - "I'm your family."

She gasps, remembering all her mother's stories of an extremist who hounded her until she left the planet. A man who threatened to kill her when she married Caleb, a _kafir._ A non-believer. This man with a weak chin and fiery but kind eyes seems completely unlike the monster she had been led to expect.

"I'm your grandfather, Ariel. I'm Sohrab." He looks at her, then crushes her to him in a hug. She tenses, then lets her cheek rest on the silken material of his clothing. "And you're home."

* * *

A/N: I know 16 is a little old for a biotic to be manifesting, but Ari isn't a particularly strong one, so I figured that might explain why. Just...just go with it.


End file.
